10 Reasons Why You Should Not Go to HLS Forum

[romothesavior]

Think about 20 years ago, HLS was considered the best of the best, now it's image is getting destroyed as seconds go down the drain.

I usually prefer to let threads like these die, but seriously... are you high? More power to ya if you are. I'm just trying to get my head around this comment.

[concurrent fork]

Think about 20 years ago, HLS was considered the best of the best, now it's image is getting destroyed as seconds go down the drain.

I usually prefer to let threads like these die, but seriously... are you high? More power to ya if you are. I'm just trying to get my head around this comment.

You didn't hear about this? HLS will be a festering toilet by 2016. At least we can still sell our JDs on craigslist.

With the exception of grading policy, none of these reasons are specific to HLS. People bitch about the same things at every LS. You will have some asshole classmates everywhere.

You clearly don't go to NYU. Though I must concede we only get one elective first year.

Clearly I don't, but how is that relevant?

[clintonius]

With the exception of grading policy, none of these reasons are specific to HLS. People bitch about the same things at every LS. You will have some asshole classmates everywhere.

You clearly don't go to NYU. Though I must concede we only get one elective first year.

Clearly I don't, but how is that relevant?

People here don't bitch about any of the things in the OP.

[DoubleChecks]

With the exception of grading policy, none of these reasons are specific to HLS. People bitch about the same things at every LS. You will have some asshole classmates everywhere.

You clearly don't go to NYU. Though I must concede we only get one elective first year.

Clearly I don't, but how is that relevant?

People here don't bitch about any of the things in the OP.

are you speaking for every NYU law student then? lol, before the OP posted, i hadnt heard anyone complain about anything in his list either (short of the IT; ill definitely give him that one...and the architecture).

[clintonius]

Ha, fair enough. And no, I can't speak for everybody at NYU, but most of those things are so far off the mark as to be absurd. That's probably not much different from the way you view them, so, yeah.

[Noval]

Care to support your argument, or are you happy simply making unsubstantiated claims? You have any evidence that Harvard's reputation has significantly changed in the past 20 years?

Judging by the fact on how many threads are being made to bash it, yes it's reputation is changing.

[DoubleChecks]

Care to support your argument, or are you happy simply making unsubstantiated claims? You have any evidence that Harvard's reputation has significantly changed in the past 20 years?

Judging by the fact on how many threads are being made to bash it, yes it's reputation is changing.

lol is that seriously your argument?

[JazzOne]

.

[Unemployed]

Care to support your argument, or are you happy simply making unsubstantiated claims? You have any evidence that Harvard's reputation has significantly changed in the past 20 years?

Judging by the fact on how many threads are being made to bash it, yes it's reputation is changing.

lol is that seriously your argument?

Admit it. HLS is, as they say on the internet, a TTT in decline. ENJOY and all that.

[IAFG]

Care to support your argument, or are you happy simply making unsubstantiated claims? You have any evidence that Harvard's reputation has significantly changed in the past 20 years?

Judging by the fact on how many threads are being made to bash it, yes it's reputation is changing.

lol is that seriously your argument?

i think ITE their class sizes makes placing from HLS harder than SLS or YLS, highlighting the relative weakness.

[APimpNamedSlickback]

.

[D-ROCCA]

+1 This thread is still going. Yes.

[DoubleChecks]

Care to support your argument, or are you happy simply making unsubstantiated claims? You have any evidence that Harvard's reputation has significantly changed in the past 20 years?

Judging by the fact on how many threads are being made to bash it, yes it's reputation is changing.

lol is that seriously your argument?

i think ITE their class sizes makes placing from HLS harder than SLS or YLS, highlighting the relative weakness.

that is a reasonable point. saying that an increase in TLS bashing of HLS = reputation decline is not lol. personally though, ive come to really like the large alumni base. someone seems to always know someone who is just outstanding in x field. im always 1 person removed (or less) from extraordinary, and as a 1L, that has dazzled me haha.

[invisiblesun]

To piggyback on DC's point, it's not like HLS students who strike out at OCI are destitute; they usually have no issue waltzing into MidLaw jobs. I'm not sure its a sign of weakness that you can't place 550 graduates into $160,000/year jobs, but rather a reality of the economy. Finally, Harvard is less selective than Yale and Stanford, which offers some advantages to YS, but people are too quick to conflate a school's selectivity with its overall strength.

[BaiAilian2013]

Ha, fair enough. And no, I can't speak for everybody at NYU, but most of those things are so far off the mark as to be absurd. That's probably not much different from the way you view them, so, yeah.

LOL I did think the same thing while reading it. There are like, 2.5 assholes in my section.

[Kohinoor]

it's not like HLS students who strike out at OCI are destitute; they usually have no issue waltzing into MidLaw jobs.

[gtang_hls13]

[Seally]

Care to support your argument, or are you happy simply making unsubstantiated claims? You have any evidence that Harvard's reputation has significantly changed in the past 20 years?

Judging by the fact on how many threads are being made to bash it, yes it's reputation is changing.

Dude, there's a reason why Harvard Law School is one of the best, there's also a reason why there's a shit load of successful alumnis from Harvard.
The reason is simple, Harvard is a good University and anyone thinking otherwise must be smoking opium, are you ?

Sorry for reviving this thread guys, this crackhead had to be corrected once for all.

[ResolutePear]

I'll take HLS over anything except Yale any day. I'll pick up an MBA and MD while I'm there.

That's right - it's a supermarket.

[scifiguy]

So I was attempting to refill my coffee cup in Pound today and was troubled to find that, of the four coffee dispensers there, every one was empty. Thus, the one reason why anyone should go to HLS evaporated. For the benefit of 0Ls, allow me to list ten reasons why you SHOULD NOT go to HLS:

1. Culture of barely concealed viciousness: That this culture is a product of the institution, and not the people who come here, can be seen from the gradual transformation that one witnesses throughout 1L year. People who came in as normal, friendly people are ground down by a culture that basically encourages people to be assholes. By 2L year, a large portion of the students, distressed at the type of behavior the school rewards, basically disconnect from the school and bide their time till graduation. The result is that the culture of the school becomes even more vicious, as the people who remain connected are primarily the ones who buy into that culture.

2. Delegated authority: Because the school is so large, and the faculty and administration so aloof, the administration delegates authority to the most obnoxious and toolish 2Ls and 3Ls to perform various tasks. Thus, LRW will be co-taught by a non-tenure track faculty members and some "BSAs," 2Ls and 3Ls whose only distinction is that they are good at Bluebooking, but not quite good enough to get on law review. These people then lord their minimal power over a crew of nervous 1Ls like a bunch of middle manager drones with blackberry belt clips. In this way, HLS makes its intent to instill in its students a culture of corporate backstabbing clear.

3. Crappy teaching: It is shocking how crappy the professors here are at teaching. They often do not seem to understand what they are teaching. Aside from this general incompetence, professors consistently choose one or two favorites, on whom they call constantly while ignoring the rest of the class. This general lousiness might be justified if they were extraordinarily brilliant academics. Though HLS has some of these, however, it also has a number of faculty members whose only significant accomplishment seems to be that they got good grades--at HLS.

4. Dysfunctional "grading" policy: The grading policy has changed about a half a dozen times in the last few months. Worse, the administration is ridiculously dishonest in the way it pursues these changes. Dean Kagan, when initially describing the proposed H/P policy, said that there would no longer be graduation honors; she lied. Recently the school made a series of changes to the policy right during the midst of EIP, without informing students of the changes at all--the only way anyone knew was by reading the online student handbook.

5. Crappy IT: Printers don't print. Computers don't compute. Everyone at HLS has like five different things that are simultaneously called "usernames" and require corresponding passwords. Whenever you have to login to some HLS website that asks simply for a "username," you have to try out several of your usernames to see which one it is asking for. When you are trying to select courses, you often have to wait in an online "queue" that can last up to an hour, and if you do not select your courses within a few minutes of reaching the front of the queue, you are thrown to the back of the queue again. You cannot order your transcript online, even if you just want to pick it up on campus. Instead, you have to order from some stupid third party in Virginia to whom HLS has outsourced the administration of its transcripts. In order to request a transcript from this Virginia outfit, you actually have to print a letter authorizing them to release your transcript, sign the letter, and then either fax it or scan it and send it to this third party, who then tells HLS to give you your transcript. It is hard to see why someone who lives a ten minute walk from HLS should have to go through a Virginia corporation to get her damn transcript.

6. Crappy OPIA/OCS: They don't know what they are doing, but talk as though they did. If you listen to them, you will end up not trying for things that you actually have a strong chance of getting.

7. Lack of choice in curriculum: In your first year, you only get to choose two courses. One of these "choices," moreover, one must be one of seven international law courses, so if you, like many law students, want to take a course that is not a huge, eighty person socratic class, this international law course will not be it. Your other choice is purportedly free, but, because your schedule is largely filled up with required courses, you really only have a choice of about ten. And if you want a small course, you probably won't get one, since these fill up very quickly.

8. Culture of hierarchy: Ever notice how, as soon as anyone from HLS becomes prominent, professors immediately crawl out of the woodwork to proclaim them the "Best student they ever taught at HLS"? Like a person suffering from Tourette's, HLS seemingly cannot help but fall back into its old habit of measuring everyone against everyone else. Every time someone from HLS becomes prominent, I bet every member of the faculty at HLS pours through his class list from past years to see whether the person was ever in his class. Then, if the professor finds that the person was in his class, though he does not remember him at all (because he is a typical HLS prof), he immediately proclaims that student "the best he ever taught"!

9. Horrible administration: The HLS administration is unbelievably bad at everything it does. Case in point: The "shopping period" only lasts a week, which is hardly enough time to get a sense of whether you actually want to stay in a class. What is worse, they don't even tell you when the shopping period ends. Instead, the law school's official calendar indicated that it ended on one day. However, several days before this day, in the late afternoon, the administration sent out an email indicating that they had moved up the deadline, and that all drops or adds should be completed by midnight that evening. In my time at HLS, I have encountered numerous situations where HLS moves around deadlines for various things, often without telling anyone, or where HLS has two different deadlines for something on different parts of its website. If you miss one of these two deadlines because you relied on the other, then they'll get all "rule of law" about it: "If we make an exception for you, we would have to make an exception for everyone!"

10. Ugly buildings: HLS surely owns a disproportionate share of the ugliest academic buildings in the country. Pound Hall, where most of your classes will be, looks like a drab suburban office park. Gropius was made a historical landmark to preserve its resplendent ugliness for future generations.

I'm sorry to hear of your experience so far (from 2010), OP. I'm actually interested in point #1 and wondering if you could elaborate more on it? Where does this "culture" or "pressure" emanate from? What exactly is it like? And how prevalent would you say it is?

Are there ever scenes amongst your clasmates from out of the movie, Good Will Hunting, involving the ponytail guy?

Are there not pockets and coteries of intellectually bright, yet caring, fun, friendly and supportive people there? Have things gotten better for you at all?

[despina]

Holy 2010 thread necro, batman.

I haven't read through all the old responses, but I'd say the OP does not reflect my experience on most points. Some of it is just plain out of date (WCC, the new building, is gorgeous and comfortable), while other things are common to pretty much all law schools (little choice in 1L courses, disengagement among 2Ls / 3Ls).

Are there not pockets and coteries of intellectually bright, yet caring, fun, and friendly people there?

Yes, there are. Law school makes these people a little more neurotic, but we're here. If OP isn't finding them, s/he wasn't looking very hard (or not giving his/her classmates the benefit of the doubt because of this super-negative attitude, maybe?).

[scifiguy]

Holy 2010 thread necro, batman.

I haven't read through all the old responses, but I'd say the OP does not reflect my experience on most points. Some of it is just plain out of date (WCC, the new building, is gorgeous and comfortable), while other things are common to pretty much all law schools (little choice in 1L courses, disengagement among 2Ls / 3Ls).

Are there not pockets and coteries of intellectually bright, yet caring, fun, and friendly people there?

Yes, there are. Law school makes these people a little more neurotic, but we're here. If OP isn't finding them, s/he wasn't looking very hard (or not giving his/her classmates the benefit of the doubt because of this super-negative attitude, maybe?).

Interesting, despina.

Would you say neurotic = mean, offensive, cutthroat...etc. in these cases?

No bullies like this famous one?:

[scifiguy]

^^Apologies above, I thought you were using "neurotic" to describe those whom, rooster, had described as "vicious" in the OP.

[despina]

Would you say neurotic = mean, offensive, cutthroat...etc. in these cases?

I haven't met anyone I'd describe as a "bully."

There are a couple of people whose open distain for public interest work (or anything besides biglaw) makes me sad, but even those people are perfectly nice to their public-interest classmates. There are definitely people who say "offensive" things, especially in class where you can wrap yourself in the "I'm just playing devil's advocate" blanket -- discussions about rape and America's place in the world come to mind as inspiring some of the most egregious examples in my 1L year. Neither of these are the majority / norm, and I imagine these types of folks exist at all law schools.

The closest thing to "cutthroat" I've seen is that a few people, for some reason, are really protective of their old outlines and share them only with a few people, requesting they not distribute more broadly. This seems odd to me as I submit all my good outlines to all the banks including the "open" ones (HL Central and WLA), and I share my notes / materials in classes I'm currently taking with anyone who asks. I'd say my approach is the norm and the close-guarding is the exception -- I've never seen or heard any of that "check out the book so nobody else can have it" nonsense, and no one has ever declined to share notes or other materials with me.

By "law school makes people a little more neurotic," I mean that the stress about future jobs combined with the uncertainty of the grading system and the stress / novelty of law school in general means that some people who are otherwise "chill" can get wrapped up in the insanity and vent to each other to try to blow off steam -- you see examples of this on TLS with the endless conversations about "how many H's do I need to do well at EIP?" and "how exactly do I figure out this bizarre course preferencing system for registration?" and "I don't think any of HLAB, law review, or BSA are a good fit for me -- what's wrong with me?!" That doesn't make people mean, just sometimes annoying to be around when you're trying to relax and not sweat the small stuff, or carve your own path away from biglaw and standard prestige activities, while other people are hyping each other up. Again, I imagine that this is common to most law schools, though I couldn't tell you whether it's better or worse here.

[MyNameIsFlynn!]

For once a good necro